Not because I was nervous or worried or stressed or scared, but because I was trying to explain to myself how we got here. Life is hard to track and stories are hard to write, but the really really good ones you can usually manage to remember most of the details.

Lying awake, I tried to remember all of ours.

I met Shelly in a lecture hall when I had just finished my undergraduate program and wasn't really sure what grad school meant yet.

Shelly met Rose before she had finished college, in a record store down the street, where he was using a record player to amplify sounds and singing through a megaphone.

Rose and Milt started their new jobs on the same day and spent the next four years making material-tech projects including a hand wired micro controlled light box and augmented reality beat maker.

Milt had two desks at that job. At the second desk, in a dank IT basement, Jason met Milt on his first day of work, and they would work together solving problems for the next three years.

We've been working together, in some capacity, for the better part of a decade, every detail leading to the moment, right now.

The first time we were all in the same place was unremarkable. I think we all met up at CVP to welcome Milt to the team. A round of Natty Boh, a toast, to set out on a journey.

We've made some truly significant accomplishments, more than most companies at our stage.

We're the only company, that I know of, to ever start their name with an indefinite article.

We're one of the only companies that still pull all-nighters as a team at the ETC.

We've made it possible for high-quality professional development to be accessible to teachers anywhere, anytime, on any device, with their friends.

Most importantly, we've found out who it is that we are together as a team.

We know what drives us, what inspires us, and what we know is going to matter more than anything else as we move forward into the future, and what it will take to make that future ours.

Last night, looking at our details, I had a hard time deciding what it is that they were.

This isn't fate.

It's faith.

Faith in each other. Faith in the fact that we are smart enough, driven enough, and care enough to do this. Faith that there are people out there who won't know what they need until they see they can have it. Faith in the future.

There isn't much more to it than that.

In An Estuary we found ourselves, and in a future that is just about to begin, we will become who we already are.

It is going to be a great story.

Take note of the details, connect the dots, live in the experience, and keep reading.

An Estuary is honored to be a part of a hand-picked group of 100 educators, technologists, and general computer science enthusiasts facilitating workshops for teachers teaching computer science in grades K-5 around the country in partnership with Code.org.

This year, Code.org is offering free professional development workshops to provide educators and others the resources they need to begin introducing students in grades K-5 to computer science basics and computational thinking skills.

In partnership with Code.org, An Estuary's Margaret Roth and Jason Lewis are servings as the Baltimore-Washington Area Regional Code.org K-5 Affiliates. As a Code.org K-5 Affiliates, Margaret and Jason facilitate monthly workshops on using the Code.org Code School curriculum at the Emerging Technology Center at the JHU Eastern Campus.

Through this program Code.org is aiming to teach 10,000 teachers and reach 100,000 students over the next year, in every state, and around the globe.

While the Dev Team was off at the Baltimore Hackathon, Margaret led An Estuary's first workshop this past Saturday. A group of nearly 30 educators from the region spent their Saturday diving into the Code.org curriculum, modifying the content for their students, and developing plans for actionable integration of computer science curriculum into their schools.

]]>The Importance of the Pie in the SkyMargaret RothThu, 02 Oct 2014 14:21:45 +0000http://anestuary.com/blog/2014/10/2/the-importance-of-the-pie-in-the-sky5202b14ae4b0c1bcad803d11:5283c076e4b09fa1698f829d:542d5e00e4b09837c7b68488I took part in a design thinking session today. During the ideation phase
of the this particular protocol, the facilitator first had us produce a
flurry of suggested solutions to our problem. He then told us to each dream
up an impossible solution, one that could require a million dollars or even
magic in order to be achievable.

I took part in a design thinking session today. During the ideation phase of the this particular protocol, the facilitator first had us produce a flurry of suggested solutions to our problem. He then told us to each dream up an impossible solution, one that could require a million dollars or even magic in order to be achievable.

In my team, we were confronting a principal's design challenge around traffic congestion during student drop-off and pickup at an elementary school. During the first part of the ideation phase, we came up with plenty of predictable (and a few clever) solutions for her. The final pie-in-the-sky-million-dollar-magical solution activity produced ideas such as a Star Trek-like teleportation system and helicopters conducting student airdrops. One idea called for establishing cafes that would provide free breakfasts and serve as satellite drop-off locations from which students could later be shuttled to the school.

At first glance, it's easy to dismiss this part of the activity as falling somewhere along the continuum of wasteful to fluffy. After all, none of them are even remotely feasible. However, if we allow ourselves to withhold judgement about why these ideas do not work, we can dive a little deeper and appreciate these ideas for the valuable insights that they do provide.

In this case, the impossible ideas have a common thread: rather than try to change traffic, they all seek to remove cars from the traffic congestion equation altogether. This produced an "ah-ha" for all involved and led our principal to favor strategies that would help her remove - rather than attempt to change - traffic.

The lesson I took away from this is that one value of giving ourselves permission to dream big and remove all obstacles is that absent our perceived constraints we may generate ideal solutions that help us cut through the fog. In this space, we can identify themes that get to the real heart of the matter. Though fantasizing about teleportation may not get us to a feasible fix, it may help us better understand the deep nature of our problem and that is when we design better solutions.

]]>A New Vanguard for Educator Professional Development in AtlantaShelly Blake-PlockTue, 23 Sep 2014 15:43:06 +0000http://anestuary.com/blog/2014/9/23/a-new-vanguard-for-educator-professional-development-in-atlanta5202b14ae4b0c1bcad803d11:5283c076e4b09fa1698f829d:5421942ae4b09a2902becbb9As anyone on-the-ground can tell you, great changes are happening in
educator professional development. From the influence of social media and
e-learning to the power of educator-driven communities of practice, PD
itself is becoming increasingly personalized. Districts large and small
have the opportunity to effect progress in education by offering ongoing
and embedded support of teaching and learning within schools and
classrooms. If we are to expect a customized experience for students, we
must first effectively model that experience for the teachers who serve
them.

As anyone on-the-ground can tell you, great changes are happening in educator professional development. From the influence of social media and e-learning to the power of educator-driven communities of practice, PD itself is becoming increasingly personalized. Districts large and small have the opportunity to effect progress in education by offering ongoing and embedded support of teaching and learning within schools and classrooms. If we are to expect a customized experience for students, we must first effectively model that experience for the teachers who serve them.

Such is the case in Fulton County, Georgia where a collaboration among district leaders, board members, the Fulton Education Foundation, the Instructional Technology Department, and the new Fulton County Vanguard Team are supporting educators. Sharing a passion for transforming what ‘school’ means for our students, this unique collaboration is striving to redefine what education looks like.

The Vanguard Team is a group of elite teachers, media and educational technology instructors, and both district and school leaders who have attained a measure of mastery in the integration of technology use with classroom instruction. As technology innovators, the Vanguard Team builds the foundation for Fulton's strategic technology initiative to ensure student access to technologies that support innovative instruction.

As a means of providing evidence of the competencies, skill sets, and interests of members, the Vanguard Team is working with Baltimore-based learning technology firm An Estuary to distribute Open Badges. The badges are provisioned through professional development courses and workshops on An Estuary’s social learning platform and are exportable to Mozilla Open Badges backpacks. In addition to the digital badges, Vanguard Team members will earn physical embroidered badges linked through NFC tags to the digital evidence of their accomplishments as recorded in their backpacks. There is much excitement about the fact that anyone entering a Vanguard classroom will not only see transformational learning and teaching, but now with the scan of a badge will be able to discover what goes on behind the scenes to develop that type of experience.

Vanguard teachers are banding together to gain perspective, fellowship, and training to make this vision of personalization a reality in all schools and for all students. The most meaningful way to leverage the technology tools in the classroom is to develop deep pedagogical knowledge, forming connections between learning outcomes and the tools which support them. This is the Vanguard Team’s shared mission. Locally, the team is viewed as the capability-building arm that supports the national, state, and district initiatives to improve standards-based instruction and outcomes for all learners. And understanding that technology is a tool that can be leveraged to support world-class instructional practices, the Vanguard Team has developed coaching plans and goals that move beyond mere tech training. The team’s objectives require personalized professional development and keeping learning front and center.

The current Vanguard Team is 75 members strong, and many of the members have been recognized for their innovations and successes locally and nationally. The goal is to grow the group to 400 members, with each school in the district having four ‘VanTeam’ members on staff. The task of ‘on-ramping’ new members is quickly becoming one that the team simply does not have the manpower to do face-to-face, so creating courses within An Estuary’s platform will help by allowing for an asynchronous vetting process to exist alongside face-to-face trainings. This ensures that all members are provided with consistent and specific professional development during the school year focusing on developing transformational, personalized learning experiences for our students while learning about and using effective coaching strategies.

Working at the cutting edge of technology-integration and outcomes-based pedagogy, the Vanguard Team is laying the groundwork for an effective journey to personalized learning for Fulton students.

Stephanee Stephens is an Instructional Technology Program Specialist in Fulton County Schools, GA.

]]>The LRS is not going to kill the LMS. The AP is going to kill the LMS (as we know it).Shelly Blake-PlockFri, 22 Aug 2014 18:20:29 +0000http://anestuary.com/blog/2014/8/22/the-lrs-is-not-going-to-kill-the-lms-the-ap-is-going-to-kill-the-lms-as-we-know-it5202b14ae4b0c1bcad803d11:5283c076e4b09fa1698f829d:53f784b9e4b02099c7d05aab

The debate as to whether learning record stores (LRSs) and learning management systems (LMSs) are in competition betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what each does and furthermore betrays a lack of imagination with regard to either.

More importantly, that dualistic debate leaves out the real rogue along the path to next gen e-learning: the AP.

Activity providers (APs) — especially those working off a standard such as xAPI — will be the human-to-machine interface of the next generation of e-learning. While those APs may include LMSs or components of LMSs, the real story will be the increasing number of APs leveraging mobile, wearables, vehicle computers, drones, and smart environments.

If you are developing for the xAPI standard, don't limit yourself to making your LMS compliant. And certainly don't complain and say that clients just don't want/need/understand xAPI because they aren't asking for your xAPI compliant LMS. Think beyond the LMS. Think beyond the traditional ways you think about the LMS.

Because the next wave of e-learning technologies (in fact the current vanguard of e-learning technologies) will be disparate in type and format — to the degree that many will not even seem like learning tools or technologies in the way that we commonly understand them now. The most successful and connected of these new technologies will leverage common standards which lend themselves to bridging learning, experience, and understanding with assessment, compliance, and measurable analytics.

Standards which create bridges across the ecosystem of formative experience.

The next generation of human-to-machine interface requires the next generation of machine-to-machine interface. The AP is at the center of that innovation between human, machine, and human.

We're about to transition into a new period in learning and understanding that has very little to do with what came before. To be more precise, a new period which will have very little to do with the technologies we've been using throughout the transition of the last several years as education in-and-of-itself has wrestled with the Internet.

It's time to leave that period behind.

And it is time to move beyond education and the technology of education as it has been realized and to move towards the technology of experience itself.

Received your email just over two weeks ago and didn't know quite how to respond. I hope you'll indulge the old blogger in me and accept this as a form of thanks for your note.

We've known each other for some time. I believe it was in 2008 that I started keeping my TeachPaperless blog. That blog brought me into the sphere of many remarkable thinkers in education, yourself included. When I closed shop over there, one of the nagging concerns I had was that it would change my relationship with the broader education community I'd in many ways grown up with professionally.

And it certainly did.

But that's part of change.

In April of 2013, myself and two teachers — Margaret Roth and Rose Burt — started this thing called An Estuary. I call it a thing because that is what it is: a beautiful and difficult-to-describe thing.

Over the last year and nearly-a-half we've been taking what we learned both in the classroom and in working with our teacher colleagues and have been building new kinds of technology which will (hopefully) ultimately benefit not just educators, but learning in the broader sense. Because I get the feeling that in all the talk about technology and, for that matter, new teaching methods and theories and whathaveyou, the thing that most often gets overlooked is learning itself.

And not just learning from a book. Or an e-book. Or a traditional classroom or a flipped classroom. Or a faculty meeting or a Twitter chat.

Learning from the clouds. Learning from the shape of a smile. Learning from a burnt finger. Learning in the form of experience.

And it has frustrated me. It's frustrated me a lot.

Because those clouds and those smiles and those burnt fingers are all we got in the end.

It's not about the tests. It's not about the numbers. It's not about the jobs and the money and the success of some and the failure of others.

It's about experience.

It's about being reminded about why you are doing what you are doing when you open up an unexpected letter from an old friend. It's about getting to the heart of experience and opening it up like an onion for all to see.

That's the thing I'm trying to do, Jerry. I'm trying to bring experience to the front. I'm trying to let folks try on a new pair of glasses and see what has been in front of them all along.

And I don't know if I'll make it. But I've got the most incredible team on earth and there is absolutely no reason not to try. And if we fail, we fail. But at least we won't have to say "what if".

Thanks for the note, Jerry. I'm glad to hear that you'll be moving closer to your grandchildren. They have no idea how lucky they are.

]]>Getting Started with PersonalizED on SanderlingRose BurtMon, 30 Jun 2014 19:04:26 +0000http://anestuary.com/blog/2014/6/30/personalized-on-sanderling5202b14ae4b0c1bcad803d11:5283c076e4b09fa1698f829d:53b1b3dfe4b01caeefbc5c99For those of you about to join Margaret and Sara in the PersonalizED session, here's a quick Getting Started Guide to get you set up in Sanderling, where the resource materials and activities for the session are stored.
]]>PersonalizED :: A Guide to Personalizing Learning in the ClassroomMargaret RothMon, 30 Jun 2014 17:52:57 +0000http://anestuary.com/blog/2014/6/30/personalized5202b14ae4b0c1bcad803d11:5283c076e4b09fa1698f829d:53b1a1abe4b020e943b4dd1e

By Dr. Mary Ellen Beaty O’Ferrall, Sara Henschell, Margaret Roth

Personalized learning is an instructional philosophy intended to address the distinct learning needs, interests, aspirations, and cultural backgrounds of individual students to create an environment and experience that best facilitates their learning (Glossary of Ed Reform, 2014). Personalized learning can be implemented with many techniques, through a combination of different methods, and successfully achieved through a variety of approaches. It can be implemented in ways that are fundamentally disruptive to the traditional classroom model, in ways that are within the traditional classroom model, with the use of technology, and without the use of technology. This paper will outline a philosophy and method for designing personalized learning in the classroom that when realized will result in the creation of a personalized learning ecosystem.

RATIONALE ::

The aim of this paper is to provide educators teaching students of any grade level, content area, ability level, or school format, with an immediate access point, resource guide, and evidence necessary to initiate the transition to personalizing their classroom environments and experiences.

As former and current high-needs classroom educators and teacher educators, we have sought ways of using the structure of education as a means of getting past the pain points of skill level disparities, disengagement, poor attendance and low family involvement. We have implemented radical changes successfully in our classroom practices, but understand the limitations of classroom teachers working inside larger systems. Our framework is designed as a way to start sustainable change that coexists with current content and standards.

FOUNDATIONS ::

The concept of personalized education is not new; but although a century has passed since it was conceived, it remains revolutionary. Helen Parkhurst first developed her educational theory in 1914. “[Parkhurst] conceives of schools as sociological laboratories where community life and community situations prevail. The children are the experimenters. The instructors are observers, who stand ready to serve the community as their special talents are needed (Dewey, 1914).” Forms in which this concept has manifested include: open classrooms, differentiation, special education, blended learning, gifted education, student-centered learning, bring-your-own-device, flipped classrooms. The iterative process through which student-centered education has evolved forms the basis that allows modern education to begin the creation of genuine personalized learning ecosystems.

A recent equity study conducted by the Center for Research on Education Equity, Assessment, and Teaching Excellence investigated the role that in-person human support took on in blended learning environments. Analyzing patterns of interaction throughout the study revealed “seven varieties of in-person human support that were frequent and notable (Pollock et al., 2014)”

Humans as fixers and explainers of technology

Humans as digesters of content

Humans as explainers of content

Humans as extenders of content, towards application

Humans as providers of feedback and assessment

Humans as regulators of behavior

Humans as peer supporters

A core value of personalized learning is prizing the human interactions the learner experiences both inside and outside of the classroom environment in a way that facilitates and inspires higher level thinking and deeper understanding. By valuing connections between humans over quantitative measures, personalized learning builds the capacity for critical thought and agency in students, and redefines the role of the teacher as an active learner alongside them.

ASSESSMENT OF NEED ::

Typical classrooms are built to enforce the concept of the teacher as sole arbiter of knowledge - chairs in rows, desk at front, the eyes of the inhabitants of the chairs forward - the perfect format for traditional “education,” but perhaps not for meaningful learning.

This format puts a premium on formal learning; however only 20% of learning is done formally; the rest is done informally through personal experience and exploration (Chatti et al., 2010). If we are keeping that personal experience out of the classroom, we are limiting the expanse of what can be taught and what can be learned.

This format of education has led to a culture plagued by teachers as answer machines and checklists, as opposed to thought provokers, learning facilitators, and advocates for independent thought. It has stifled student self-reliance, capacity for critical thought, curiosity, and creativity, and ultimately has degraded the humanity of our students and our teachers.

FRAMEWORK FOR PERSONALIZATION OF LEARNING ::

Personalization of learning is dependent on the creation of a student centric ecosystem within the classroom. This is established through equitable communication, increased flexibility and accessibility, positive integration of tools, and focus on the humanity of students and teachers of the community. The suggested framework minimally relies on institutional hardware or technology, but rather focuses on the use of tools that are native to students and their environment and that encourages student to teacher, teacher to student, and student to student communication.

We are not abandoning the response to intervention model, as most classroom teachers can’t realistically get away from this model as they are held accountable to the standards and systems their wider communities have put in place. Nor are we stating that all standards should be thrown away. Rather we are insisting that the scope of these standards can be expanded to include how students really learn, in and out of class, through the personalization of learning.

The creation of a personalized learning ecosystem in the classroom is dependent on the implementation of systems that remove teacher-centric structures and transfer ownership to students thus increasing the capacities for agency, responsibility, control, and empowerment, and fundamentally change the experience of learning for the student as “no matter how solid and thought provoking the curriculum may be, when the voice of the student is deemphasized or forgotten, learning suffers (Powell, 2014).

There is no one-sized-fits-all model for this and it depends more on state-of-mind and intention to be successful. A teacher must want to teach to the specific needs and desires of the students in their classroom, and the students must be sufficiently supported and empowered to want to learn in this ecosystem.

In order to do this, we have constructed a basic framework for implementing personalized learning that focus on five elements of framework design to effect change.

ELEMENTS OF PERSONALIZED LEARNING DESIGN ::

The elements of classroom practice that must be changed to create a personalized learning ecosystem in any classroom model or learning environment are:

Roles of People in the Classroom

Communication

Content Decentralization

Feedback

Data and Evaluation

ROLES OF PEOPLE IN THE CLASSROOM ::

The roles of people in the classroom must be designed through attention to both physical structure and emotional structure. Deliberate thought needs to be put into the construction of space and purpose in space in order to effectively create an environment for personalized learning (Reich 2014). Changes can be made to each of these aspects through decentralization.

Roles can be changed physically by simple alterations in classroom setup. The classroom should not have a single fixed focal point but rather spaces for different learning objectives including spaces for collaboration, spaces for focus, and spaces for thought and process. Elements of distraction and unnecessary visuals should be removed. Elements that enhance focus and encourage creativity should be included. The environment must be flexible for reconfiguration. Organization must be maintained in the space at all times.

Focus on alterations that flatten classroom structure will enhance the positive emotional experiences of teachers and students. All members of the classroom ecosystem must be able to access knowledge, learn from each other, teach each other, feel valued as learners, take responsibility for their learning, and hold value in the knowledge they are gaining and the experiences they are sharing with others.

Questions to consider when designing the roles of people in the classroom to personalize learning include:

What are the role of all members in a classroom?

How is the space being deliberately designed to support the roles of people in the room?

How can the classroom focus more on students and student choice?

How are you going to facilitate different types of learning happening at one time in the same room?

Where is the teacher’s desk?

Where are the students’ focal points directed?

There are many factors that affect how the relationships and roles of the people in the room are going to work and it is essential that they are each evaluated for their physical and emotional impacts on learning.

COMMUNICATION ::

Communication must have aspects that are quantitative, such as shared data and standards, and qualitative, such as explanation of why tasks are important, what will be gained from lessons, and an understanding for the expectations of product outcomes.

Modern methods of communication must be employed to ensure clear expectations of students, communication with families, and in peer groups within the in the learning ecosystem. Tools such as mobile applications make regular communication to parents and students viable on a mass scale.

Classroom communities will have to place a premium on students and teachers asking questions and finding answers. Modeling is key. Some students will need direct instruction on how to ask questions and additional frameworks set up to help foster their student to student interactions.

With reflection on the process, teachers can design changes that will result in greater accountability through increased knowledge. Examples of changes that can be made are as easy as putting lesson plans online or making a student calendar that lists what reading, assignments, and concepts are covered in a unit.

Questions to consider when designing communication to personalize learning in the classroom include ::

How are you managing communication in your classroom?

How often are you communicating?

How is it effective ?

How can you make is more effective?

What tools are you going to use to simplify this routine and create process?

The more simple, accessible, convenient, frequent, and consistent the communication process is between all members of the learning ecosystem is, the greater success personalized learning can have.

CONTENT DECENTRALIZATION ::

Adding supports and extension to classroom content are the keys to making sure that students have the information that is relevant to their needs as learners. The process of decentralizing content will require the teacher to gradually release power until the teacher is more of a coach, providing feedback and pushback, getting students to improve the quality and depth of thought, writing, and conversation over time (Pollock, et al., 2014).

By decentralizing content, students can help themselves informally to experience information and further their learning. Additionally, this provides the teacher with seamless opportunities to address skill deficits and provide extension for students who require more information for deeper investigation of content.

This can come in the form of office hours, structured student study groups, cloud based content resources, and student and teacher curated wikis. Selecting several ways of decentralizing content is the best way of providing for the varying needs of different learners.

Questions to consider when decentralizing content to personalize learning in the classroom include ::

Where does the content live?

Who has access to it?

When do they have access to it?

How is the content scaffolded to meet student needs?

What tools are you using to share and curate content?

The decentralization of content should provide all members of the personalized learning ecosystem, teachers and students, with opportunities for personal exploration, engagement in peer to peer interaction, with any necessary direct instruction being prepared and delivered by varying members of the community.

FEEDBACK ::

The key to effectively creating a personalized learning ecosystem is providing students with regular, varied and meaningful feedback that promotes and pushes student growth. Feedback must come from all members of the classroom community and be facilitated between all members of the classroom community - student to student, student to teacher, and teacher to student.

The process becomes natural once all members of the classroom community have learned to give and receive feedback. This capacity can be built through students giving feedback in peer groups and through self reflection. Students can learn how to use feedback to create positive growth in their work.

Questions to consider when designing feedback methods to personalize learning in the classroom include ::

How are you providing feedback?

How often are students getting feedback?

Who is providing it?

What tools are you using to manage feedback?

Feedback must be meaningful in that it can be acted on, reflected on, and achievable, and it must hold value within the community.

DATA AND EVALUATION ::

The last key element to effective implementation of personalized learning in the classroom is the ability to collect and show documentation of the process of learning through the shared collection of data and evaluation.

It is key to capture the process from start to finish, saving drafts, comments, conversations, and revisions in a place that is accessible by student, teacher, family and school leadership.

This can be accomplished through the collection of artifacts of effective student feedback, reflection and communication, and other elements of qualitative data and quantitative data including student project portfolios, electronic folders taking screenshots of student interactions on message boards. Students must be included in this process and understand the value of documenting their learning over time. By involving students in the collection of data and the process of evaluating that data over time, ownership, agency, and self-worth of students is increased.

Quantitative data is a part of most standard classroom curriculums, and is still relevant to personalized learning environments. Students should have access to these measures, be included in the design of evaluation metrics and assignments, and in the evaluation process.

Questions to consider when designing data and evaluation methods to personalize learning in the classroom include ::

What qualitative measure are you tracking?

What quantitative measures are you tracking?

Who has access to the data?

What tools are you using to track, communicate and collect data?

Who is involved in the creation of evaluation methods?

Ultimately, students deserve access to their own data. If it is to mean anything at all, they need to understand where they are at and where they need to be, which will enable teachers as facilitators to empower them to take responsibility for their own learning and continue to strengthen the the personalized learning ecosystem.

CONCLUSION ::

When framing the way in which teaching and learning will and can occur, we must remember at the very root what it is that we are trying to do.

“Teach means ‘to show how.’ You can teach someone, or someone can teach you. Learn means ‘to find out about something.’ A person must learn things for himself. Someone else may teach him, but he must do the learning for himself (Stoddard, 1952).”

At the end of this current school year, a student who participated in this framework wrote a letter reflection on the experience.

He said, “I didn’t know that I was allowed to have opinions and thoughts about so many things. I have all these ideas that go through my head and now I know I can think about them and do something about them for myself.”

ABOUT THE AUTHORS ::

Mary Ellen Beaty-O’Ferrall, Ph.D, is an associate clinical professor in the School of Education at Johns Hopkins University. Her teaching and research focuses on literacy, urban school partnerships, and service learning.

Sara Henschell is an urban educator in Baltimore City focused on school reform. The current theory focus she is exploring is individualized education and the tech tools that can help effectively facilitate it. Currently, she teaches Journalism, Advanced Placement Literature and a project-based English remediation course and is dual-certified in the state of Maryland to teach Secondary English and Special Education.

Margaret Roth is the COO and of An Estuary. She is the former Director of Operations for the Johns Hopkins University Office of Experiential Education. Additionally, Margaret is the Co-founder of EdTechWomen, organizer of Edcamp Baltimore, and member of the Edcamp Foundation Partners Program Committee.

I hate dealing with paper. From making copies to handing back work, it is my least favorite thing about teaching. I need better methods of dealing with paper and turning in work. I love grading message boards, and turning things in via Google Drive is great except for all the emails. These ideas don’t scale well. So, when I saw Where’s My Stuff?: Managing Student Workflow with Google Apps, I was super pumped. It made the top of my ISTE2014 sessions to attend list. So, I went! And I am so happy I did.

I need a tool and a method to help manage this process without needing to spend more of my time learning how to use a tool. Google has this je ne sais quoi of teacher solutions. Obviously, you need some basic skills to get started. Can you use Google? Good news. But seriously, most teachers I know use email, apps and messaging through Google already and manage without extensive training. If they don’t, there are some great videos up on the presenter, Aaron Svoboda’s website.

The main take-away method for me was having a Google form for submitting work. Mr. Svoboda’s idea is that you create a form (a Google survey - forms are located in your Google Drive already) that has key information and directs students not to share their document with you, which generates a metric ton of email, but to make it editable by anyone with a link. This is not hard to figure out, the permissions are easy to find and easy to change again; see the website for more specific detail.

And, if you are trying to track something like multiple choice questions, you can go one step further and run a script in the spreadsheet you get from the submissions of your Google Form. I recommend Flubaroo.

Then… we got to see Google Classroom. We all got to log into it as students. This made my ticket worth the price. THE FUTURE IS NOW. ALL THE GOOGLE APS. I run screaming into the future via Google. I want this so hard, I can taste it. To me, at first glance, it seems like all the best parts of Wikispaces, Edmodo, and Blackboard all rolled into one awesome set of tools - you have a website, cloud space to organize content that is community curated, calendars, specific ways of turning in and recording grades for students that also emails the student their grade with a click. Google has a video, if you need to see it, and you do.

Here's the thing, it is not Google’s apps that make me more effective; it is the way I use them and how easy they are for me to teach students to use. Good design is good for everyone.

People too often try and push really gimmicky and poorly designed things on teachers because they think we don’t know any better.

Here is Occam's Razor for Teaching: if it is hard to use and not making your life easier — don’t use it.

Stop using worthless tools. If you have to struggle with, fight with or can’t depend on a tool, either it is a crap tool, the wrong tool, or you need more training.

Very few times is the correct answer more training. Spend your training time improving your real work — helping kids learn.

You can’t walk around ISTE without tripping over a session about Google and their offerings for education. And it is not a surprise to me because it has been the same at most conferences I have been to this year. At the JEA national conference, I learned a ton of awesome ways to use Google Forms and Docs to help me set up and run my paper staff. The thing about Google is that their tools just work and they are easy for teachers and students to use. If you are a teacher…or if you are breathing air and thinking, you probably use Google all the time.

Consolidating tools makes sense and having tools that work with each other also seems like a no brainer. But a tool is just a tool, it is how you use that tool that makes the difference. And, as I said in an earlier post, I am here for methods. I want to use what I have more effectively. Adding more tools seems clunky and inefficient to me.

The first session I attended today was Google Hangouts 101. I attended because I have used hangouts in my personal life (if you play MMO’s and have group members in other places, there is nothing like a hangout to yell for help from your healer) But…. That is probably not the best use of this tool in the classroom, although some people on the general chat in WOW desperately need the help of an English teacher.

Sometimes finding different methods to use a tool you are already comfortable with are quick ways to add to your practice. For instance, I have often had authors in my Baltimore City Schools classroom via the Penn/Faulkner Foundation (p.s. if you haven’t checked that out, you should — it is the in-class visit resource I know of). I host authors in my classroom 2 or 3 times a year, which is great. But… my kids are nervous and I think they could get more out of the visit if they had them more often and got used to the process. Google Hangout — boom. Instant visit. That is recordable. That has a ton of interactive feature. I can take notes and live stream them on the screen. They can come back to it and reflect on how it went, so that when a live person comes they are really and truly getting the most out of the session.

Also, Google has come up with a series of virtual field trips through Connected Classrooms that provide access to places and people that students normally don’t get a chance to interact with.

The second workshop I attended was about managing digital workflow with Google Apps. More on that later.

A Note ::

I am blogging about every session I attend on Sanderling to help share what I am learning at ISTE for all the people in our PLN who couldn’t make the conference or are at different sessions. If you would like a copy of my notes from each session, find me on Sanderling: @thebookeater or Twitter: @sarahenschell.

We would also love to hear about what you have done and seen here at ISTE, so please share with the Sanderling community!

People learn at different speeds. Guess what, teachers are also people. I have been talking about this a lot lately and I am not alone; teachers want differentiated PD. Especially when it comes to tech.

For some context, in Baltimore, I feel that there is a gap between teachers who do actively use tech and those who… won’t. There are a lot of reasons why the people who don’t use tech won’t. They don’t have equitable access, they don’t naturally adopt it or they might not see how it enhances their classroom practice.

It is easier to be against something if you can’t have it, than it is to want something you can't have.

On a systemic scale, the PD that is available can only cater to what technology initiatives a district can support. In turn, schools are only able to provide PD for things that they can support. Urban districts are cash strapped and pressed on by testing and attendance issues. We won’t even get into the time spent on Common Core roll out. And so we come down and down, more and more restricted, more and more limited in the scope of what we can access and accomplish.

This is a climate that puts innovation behind many other things out of a necessity to meet the minimum across the board. We can’t keep doing things like this. It isn't working. Some teachers are ready to move to the level of being innovative and are held back. Most who are savvy have found ways around the limits of their schools and districts, but that is not sustainable.

It is not sustainable always to be having to find ways to outwit the system.

There have to be equitable ways to serve teachers as learners. Schools are going to lose their best teaching talent if they can’t give them what they need and this is only going to make the gap larger between schools who are effective and those who are not.

What do we do about this? I am not exactly sure, but it can’t and doesn't need to be expensive. It just needs to be responsive and tiered. We need to know what skills teachers have and what skills they need to develop and, to be clear, I am not talking about classes and conferences attended. CV’s won’t cut it.

What skills does a teacher have with the tools they need to use to prepare students for the future?

]]>Just In Time Is Just Not Good EnoughMargaret RothSat, 28 Jun 2014 20:47:42 +0000http://anestuary.com/blog/2014/6/28/just-in-time-is-just-not-good-enough5202b14ae4b0c1bcad803d11:5283c076e4b09fa1698f829d:53af2845e4b0c19cb475feb1

Last night I overheard a lot of people casually talking about teachers and women in some pretty banal ways. Someone said, “Teachers have never been professionals, they are tradesmen and apprentices.” Another was talking about the gender split at the conference and said something along the lines of: "there will be teachers and they are women." P.S. for the record, I agreed to a point, statistically there are more female teachers and there are less women in tech, but there was a generalization there that either needed more context or was banal.

Not all women are teachers. Not all teachers are women and having been a trade should not sound like a slur out of someone’s mouth. Guess what, in their similarly long history as a form of work doctors and lawyers were also tradesman, but now they get to be professionals. Is it because they are historically male-dominated forms of work?

When I tell people outside of teaching and especially at edtech events I am a teacher and the city I teach in, they have two reactions: “Oh, you poor thing.” As if I am a victim of circumstance and have been duped into teaching in the city in some Dickensian way. The other reaction is that I am some manner of saint who works in the salt mines to save all the children in Baltimore. Go ahead and mourn my lack of resources, but know that my room is JAMMED with tech. Because I am a savvy professional who has been resourceful and found ways to get the tools I need for my kids. That is what professionals do to get their job done.

Furthermore, my kids don’t need saving, they need access to education. They also don’t need some saint via Alcott to come and sacrifice herself and deny herself the ultimate female fulfillment and joy of just getting married and having her own little brood of sweet cherubs to be realized.

I don’t like ranting without solutions. There are a lot of people in EdTech who are not teachers. I am cool with that and happy to work with them. (and obviously, I do). I live with programmers; I realize it is easier for me to see what they do than for them to see what I do.

To change this the people making tools for teachers would be wise to make the effort to come and actually see the environment and people that they are making tools for. Just be sure to bring some coal for the stove when you come.

For some of us, “data” has become a scary word. Especially within the context of the fear culture we have created around it. Here, data is a big evil green monster that is going to follow you around for the rest of your life, ruin every chance you ever had to get a job, and make the cost of your health insurance skyrocket. Like Cthulhu, data is a monster that, emerging from its hidden lair, will destroy your life and then eat you.

This conception of data is a lie. Data is not a monster. Data is information, experiences, discrete facts collected for a purpose. Data is a currency, a currency we have the choice where to spend, what to buy, and how much to save up.

Sometimes we spend our data on the attention of others. Social media posts, pictures, selfies, tweets, they’re all self-imposed paparazzi, they’re pieces of data that we freely fling to the world. Sometimes we spend that data on college admission. Sometimes we spend that data on an endless stream of the perfect movies we never even knew that we wanted to watch next but we love.

Here’s the tradeoff: when you’re talking about data, you’re also talking about software, and with software, everything is a tradeoff. As a well-known adage in the software world goes: If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. If you’re not paying with money, you’re probably paying with data.

Sometimes we decide to pay with data; sometimes we pay people to collect our data. Sometimes we do both at the same time.

Think Netflix. Hulu. Amazon. Anything with a recommendation engine. You are paying to get the content that is most relevant to you. You are paying for a service where computers use massive sets of data collected from across the population to create a system that outputs a perfect experience for you.

By using that service, we are paying with our data. What we watch, what we stop watching, what we watch over and over again. Spread this out over the millions of people using the service, we get to a point where the individual does not matter. No one is sitting in a room looking at your data and judging you, for only watching movies starring Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen.

When we get to this level, your personally identifiable information is the first thing that is stripped out, because it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that when we get rid of all the personal information and have millions of data points aggregated from across the population, we can begin to teach computers to recognize patterns, and in turn, let you know every time a new Judd Apatow gem becomes available on Instant.

When we get to this level, it’s not a matter of collecting data, it’s about securing it.

Security is, in every case, a tradeoff with accessibility. You can have 100% security of data: in a computer, powered off, not connected to anything else, in a cement box, buried in lead. You can also have 100% accessibility, through up a public website or constant television broadcast, 24 hours a day, forever. Everything else is somewhere in the middle. Security is relative, and it is relative to accessibility. If you want something to be useable, you have to allow access to it in some form. Or it’s not going to be very useful to anyone. So the decision has to be made which data is useful, how accessible it needs to be to remain useful, and how secure does it need to be to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.

When we post on Twitter, or any other publicly accessible forum, we’ve waived the right to the security of that data. This is why laws like COPPA exist, to protect children from sharing potentially sensitive information about themselves when they’re too young to understand the ramifications.

The key in both cases is that the information is personally identifiable. When we’re talking about the type of data Google collects (especially in the case of GAFE, where ads aren’t even in play), individuals don’t matter. You are not a unique and special snowflake, and completely uninteresting… until you collect millions of snowflakes to make a snowman.

The “snowman” here is developing more sophisticated algorithms to understand this type of data, so that products (the same ones you’re getting for “free”) can be improved and become more useful, and to develop future technologies that are also going to improve life, education, and so on.

And when we build that “snowman” with xAPI, it changes the way we collect, use, and access, every single piece of our learning process and our learning ability. Any Learning Record Store created will be more secure than a student records office. The latter can be penetrated with a lock pick; the former uses the same encryption protocols and security measures used by banks, the military and Google. And it is more useful because your data is in a form where we can actually do something with it, where we can derive meaning from it.

We make these tradeoffs, knowingly and willingly, because data in isolation is useless. When data has friends to play with it is massively useful, because that data is being used to create something better, to create a better experience down the road.

To create an experience that will fundamentally change the way learning happens on Earth.

One of the great things about conferences is that they let you get out of the sound chamber of your community. This is true of people working in tech, teachers and, really, life at large. When you go out into the world, you get perspective which helps you assess what you are thinking and doing. It also gives you new stuff to bring home to your community space to grow and sustain.

We have not been in Atlanta very long, but we have been talking about ISTE for weeks. So, it sort of feels like we were already here waiting to pop out of a box. This afternoon I lurked around some Hack Education sessions and tried to get a feel for what is going on in the larger community versus what I have in my head. I took at ton of notes and talked to people after the session and feel like my desire to find perspective was rewarded.

Really, I am here looking for methods. I can find apps all day everyday. I want to find ways of sustaining their use and usefulness to my students, my fellow teachers and helping me do all the things I want to do more efficiently. It is easy to get overwhelmed here, there is a ton of stuff going on. I took one look at the printed booklet and was like “ALL OF THE SESSIONS.”

Margaret has already requested we be sent clones. I want to run through the halls, arms flung wide screaming and grabbing pens and stickers, downloading apps as fast as my phone will let me But, I digress! Focus is key! I am using Margaret’s Rules for going to Conferences and my desire for methods over app to select a few great sessions. I have selected a few, not an exhaustive list, but a practical one for helping me absorb enough information to be functional.

As an habitual reader of the annual Horizon Reports, I admit to often rushing straight to the parts about current and future developments in technology.

This year's K-12 edition has got a pretty good overview of current things happening in the space and some of the stuff out there on the horizon.

Here at An Estuary, we are working on a series of interrelated pieces of a technological puzzle around professional learning. Here's a quick list of some of the things on the map for us — all of which support and extend our social learning platform and professional learning courses.

xAPI

We're actively developing technology in this space. xAPI will be the foundation for considerable future development; and we're excited about some of the more esoteric implications. Anyone interested in technology and learning owes it to themselves to do some research on what's happening with xAPI. One of the things we're really interested in is the way that development around xAPI shifts your thinking from an education mindset to a learning mindset — a mindset focused on experiences.

Open Badges

One of the first things we did during the early beta of Sanderling was to set things up so that we could provision Open Badges to learners participating in projects through our courseware. Ultimately badges are more than just gold stars or recognition for competency and skill sets; they are a fundamental challenge to the way we recognize, verify, and accredit learning — whether formally or informally.

Wearable Learning Data

This is some exciting stuff. And a lot of it comes out of consumer tech and technology around health and fitness. We see all of that directly applicable to learning tech. And so we've started formulating some prototypes. At ISTE 2014, An Estuary's Margaret Roth and Baltimore City Public Schools teacher Sara Henschell are presenting on personalized learning — and each participant who successfully completes the PersonalizED workshop earns a physical Open Badge. These are embroidered badges which are physical representations of your digital badges and which are fit with NFC tags that point to the corresponding Open Badge online. Putting this project together has made us think about a range of problems and possibilities and led us to even build a new system for quickly programming tags in-the-field which link to your Mozilla Backpack. This initial test with 136 workshop participants at ISTE will tell how well the system works.

Sometimes people ask why we chose professional learning as the space in which to investigate and develop new technologies. And I usually respond by pointing to the stuff we've created. This is an endlessly fascinating space which, by way of the technological links between learning and work, encourages the development of interconnected pieces that have important implications far beyond what we usually think of when we think about learning.

Conferences can be overwhelming, they can be tiring, they can be nothing like you expected. This ultimately makes them exciting. It all depends on what you make of them and what you make them for yourself.

I’ve been lost between being really excited for ISTE and really worried/nervous/anxious about ISTE. It wasn’t until this past Tuesday that I actually figured out why I had been feeling like this. I’d been feeling like this because at the last several conferences that I had gone to, I hadn’t learned anything.

On Tuesday, I went to my first software conference. It was overwhelming, tiring, and not at all what I had expected. I felt like didn’t know a single thing about any of the topics that were being discussed. Not a single thing. Of course this is not really accurate, but it is how I felt at the time none the less. I had two options, shut down and wander, or give in to the fact that I didn’t know everything and explore.

I learned more in one day then I have learned at several other events combined. That is not because they weren’t amazing conferences, with brilliant speakers, and fascinating attendees - it’s because I was doing it wrong. I had fallen into the trap of always going to sessions that I knew something about, sessions that I thought were interesting because I was familiar with the content, not because they were going to expand my mind. Not because I was going to allow myself to be taught, not because I wanted to learn.

I would go to sessions, knowing that well if I was bored I could always leave (Edcamp habits die hard), or that if I had some experience with the content maybe I could help someone else.

I had fallen into the echo chamber, willingly relinquishing my own awareness of my choice to or not to learn. I was lost in the echo chamber of the same jargon, the same content, the same conversation, the same false inspiration, being recycled over and over again, to the point where I could not even tell.

Going to that software conference shook me out of this. I remembered that feeling of knowing that you are learning.

And I know that I am not the only person that is stuck in the echo chamber.

I’m warning you now - you’re doing it wrong.

And to prevent others and myself from continuing to do it wrong, these are my five rules for picking ISTE sessions and committing to learning for myself.

Don’t go to sessions just because you’ve “always wanted to meet them in person.” Go read their book, their blog, their whatever, and find a session where you can learn just as much if not more from someone who you may never get the chance to learn from again.

Don’t go to a session because if you “get bored you can always just leave and go somewhere else.” This is channel flipping; it wastes your time. And this time matters. (Of course, if the session really isn’t meeting your needs, by all means go find something that does).

Don’t go to sessions to learn how to use a single “app.” A single “app” is not going to transform your classroom, your teaching, or learning for students. That day is done, and really it never dawned. And to be honest, the people who made that “app” probably have excellent tutorial videos that you can access from anywhere. Don’t waste your ISTE time on that.

Don’t pick sessions without doing your homework. There are literally hundreds of sessions to choose from. Research the speakers, the topics, and select what meets your personal learning goals. This is your conference. Make it personal. Personalized learning doesn’t mean doing whatever you want, it means creating a learning experience based on the interests, needs, and aspirations of the individual. And in this case that is you. This should be your personalized conference learning experience.

Don’t be afraid not to know. Pick one session every day that seems completely alien, a session that will make you feel like you know nothing. Let it expand your brain. This will be the session that you won’t be able to get out of your head.

ISTE is an amazing opportunity. It is our responsibility to make it a life changing learning experience. No one else can or will do that for you. You have to do if for yourself.

P.S. - One other thing. Get off your phone. Get off your device. Get engaged. Be here now. Because before you know it, we're all going to be on our way home.